Mind Soup

What better way to end a great year than to sit down and think about the great memories and opportunities it has brought you. Overall this year was a very good year, perhaps one of the best years I've lived so far. This year has been full of achievements and memories that I would like to share with my readers as a tribute to my readers. January: Though I did not know it then, this month has probably set the ground-stone for my career life. In this month I took one of the major decisions that I will ever make. During a period where all my friends were filling in medical school applications, begging for recommendations and stressing over their grades, I decided, and after three years of premedical studies, that I will not be applying to any medical school and forgo the idea of med-school. This decision has came after a lot of considerations and consultations with family and close friends. It was not an issue of grades nor the issue of time, but I had a more clear vision where I wa...

(CNN) -- Oprah Winfrey will announce on Friday's "The Oprah Winfrey Show" that she will end her talk show, said a spokesman for Winfrey's Harpo Productions. "Oprah will be ending her talk show," Harpo spokesman Don Halcombe said Thursday. "She will be speaking about it on tomorrow's live show." The show will air live from its Chicago, Illinois, studio at 9 a.m. CT (10 a.m. ET), he said. The show will end on September 9, 2011, as its 25th season draws to a close, according to a letter from Harpo Inc. that President Tim Bennett addressed to partners and obtained by CNN affiliate WLS-TV. "Tomorrow, Oprah will announce live on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" that she has decided to end what is arguably one of the most popular, influential and enduring programs in television history," Bennett wrote.  The show has been the highest-rated talk show for 23 consecutive seasons, according to the Oprah.com site. It is seen by an estim...

NASA now gives anyone the opportunity to send their name to Mars . Just enter your name, country and zip code into the form, and your name – along with many others – will be included in a microchip on the Mars Science Laboratory rover which will be heading to Mars in 2011. NASA has actually done this before, for example, you could have sent your name to Mars with the Phoenix rover . However, now that this has been found by Reddit , I’m afraid that that list of names sent to Mars will be an odd one indeed. First of all, there’s no captcha, and the form accepts nearly anything, even very long entries. From Reddit’s commenter digitalboy: “ It appears that the input is unbounded. One could then send a somewhat long Base64 encoded binary messages to mars. I’m sure there is SOME bound somewhere but it doesn’t appear to be on the form. I create a 4k first name and it took it as input. What to send…. Perhaps a map to my house? Perhaps the lyrics to my favorite song? Fibonacci sequence? Prime...